Many aspects of electronic communication, and in particular electronic commerce, are based on business documents that parties can exchange over a computer connection. A big problem in current e-Business is the variety in structure and description of business information and business documents. The absence of uniform and standardized methods for the common representation of the structure and semantics of business data led to today's situation where there is an increasing growth of different representations of electronic business information and documents. There are today many Business-to-Business (B2B) electronic commerce standards addressing diverse aspects of the standardization issue. A B2B interoperability standard in general involves the description of the message formats exchanged, bindings to transport protocols, the sequencing of messages, and security issues. A world-wide accepted syntax for representation exists with extensible markup language (XML), but this does not solve the problem of non-uniform semantics and structure.
Some business documents are based on reusable building blocks that define the semantics of the document data. An example of a standard that defines such building blocks is the electronic business XML (ebXML) Core Components Technical Specification issued by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, which specification is hereafter referred to as CCTS. The semantic building blocks defined by the CCTS are the foundation for human legibility and automatic machine processing so that an integrated interoperability can be guaranteed. The CCTS based building blocks are syntax free and very flexible, because they are based on a modular concept. Business information can be assembled for all demands by reusable building blocks. “Syntax free” means that these building blocks can be generated in form of a generic model which can then be exported to arbitrary representations, like XML, ABAP Objects or Java classes.